How Much is How Much?

I was waiting for an autorickshaw last evening, at a place you don’t normally get autos. I’d just gotten off a colleague’s car. The option was a short but irritating trudge back home through thick carbon monoxide.

An auto appeared almost instantly and I jumped in. As is the standard practice (meters don’t work in Delhi), I asked ‘How much to E-Block?’
‘Whatever you like…’ the man smiled.

‘Tell me, what’s the problem?’ I insisted nervously.

‘Ok, Rs 15.’

Which was lower than the usual (non-meter) rate so I said ‘I’ll give you Rs 20, let’s go.’ I was also feeling a little happy about avoiding the walk, getting back home in time to play with my daughter.

As the auto groaned its way through the traffic the driver grinned, ‘I’m coming from Pahargunj, you’re the first fare I managed.’ (Pahargunj is some distance away, not too much, but lots for an auto on its last legs.)

‘Happens, sometimes… you’ll make it up tomorrow,’ I told him distantly, dismissing it as a weak attempt to get an extra fiver off me.

Which is when I thought of giving him Rs 500.

Ok. Deep breath. It gets a little tricky here, I'm writing as I'm thinking.

I’d been thinking of the value of money lately. How much was I worth? Who decided? How much did I need? What did I need, in the first place? Did Rs X have the same value for me as say, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan? Not in a transactional way (1 kg potato costs Rs Y for both Ash and me, barring variables of geography or scale like buying a truckload at a district centre and getting a better price… but I don’t think Ash or I would do that in a hurry) – but in real value? Would Rs X have the same real value for me 5 years later? For example, would I buy a rare book or a silk curtain or just milk for the dog?

One question led to another, and as expected, the trail led to the door of long-dead Greek philosophers. In their absence, here’s a working answer which I have the right to change the second I finish writing this article.

Money is work. Work is experience. Or rather, the quality of experience. So, money is the quality of experience you undergo to earn it.

This is of course highly subjective and highly debatable.

Subjective because experience is intrinsically unique – you and I might do the same work with the same quality of finish, but our experiences might be radically different because we’re different people with different DNAs and different acquired knowledge and (I like throwing in this banal phrase occasionally) different levels of spirituality.

Debatable because a human rights activist might (rightly) accuse me of ignoring the less privileged. (‘You’re elitist! What about street children? What quality of experience are you talking about? Do they have a choice?’) A debate I intend to wriggle out of effortlessly by stating this is for working professionals with the moral and intellectual ability to identify choices and the occasional willingness to act on them. (Er… street children are working professionals too, but it’s 3am and I’m off to make some more coffee.)

So, to get back to the point, how much is my apartment worth? Let’s see. I’m paying EMIs, lots of EMIs, and will be paying them over the next 20 years. Each EMI is about 1/6th of my current monthly salary. Now I can state with absolute certainty that I spend at least 1/6th of a working day doing absolutely nothing. Just trancing out into alphaville. Staring at the dirt under my nails, that sort of thing. There’s no quality of experience simply because I’m not thinking. So if the experience is zero, then the money I earn doing it is also zero. Thus, the real worth of my apartment is also zero. And I wouldn’t be too upset if a tsunami hit it this evening, provided there was no loss of life.

Questions like ‘But you’re really happy and working and productive the other 5/6th of the time? At least 1/6th? What if your apartment is financed by that experience?’ might be asked by those brainwashed in the philosophy of one Rene Descartes. To them, my answer is ‘I decide, therefore I am.’ We’re treading very subjective ground here. Besides, Descartes’s cause-and-effect theories are possibly out of date.

It boils down to this: X quality of old experience should be worth X quality of new experience if not more, never mind the price tag. If you had a great time for an hour and earned Rs 5000 as a result, then think carefully before you slam down that Rs 5000 for a pair of sunglasses. Will it give you the same returns, in terms of quality of experience, for at least an hour? Sounds ridiculous? Now what if the sunglasses were worth Rs 50 and look great, does that change the axis? In my book, no. I would still go by quality of experience including time spent, not the cost. So if the glasses were worth Rs 10000 and promised at least an hour of the original joy, I’d go for it. But then I don’t like sunglasses. I don’t like most ‘things’, most labels, so perhaps it makes it easier for me. Less angst.

That’s my working philosophy for the day. It might not work for you. It might not always work for me either. But it’s a different path I’m willing to walk on, at least part of the way. It forces me to question the real value of my experiences, of my life. And that’s fun.

I didn’t give the autowallah Rs 500, finally. I realised giving him Rs 20 instead of the Rs 15 he asked for, meant a certain quality of experience for him, a certain joy.

In fact my joy of getting home earlier and playing with my daughter = his joy of getting an unexpected tip after a fruitless journey. Small, but very meaningful.
What guarantee did I have these joyous experiences would suddenly be enhanced, with a forced-on price tag? I don’t like Descartes, I told you…